Marketing and Sales

Analytics is vital to understanding customer behavior and optimizing operations to attain sustainability. It can be leveraged to avail data-driven decision making—and extrapolated and customized to accomplish numerous objectives, such as reducing costs and optimizing profits from a customer or project. The article seeks to propose four features to reap long-term benefits through concentrated investments.

Find answers to these questions and more in this Marketing and Sales Practice Area. If you are new to Marketing and Sales, take advantage of the resources below and don't be shy about commenting or asking questions. If you're a seasoned pro, help others out and become an influencer. We welcome contributions from all sources and the more you participate, the more visible you become. Let us help you move down the road from "giver of sage advice" to "Thought Leader".

On-demand Webinars

Consumers spend more time with their mobile devices than any other form of media. Marketers know mobile engagement is mission-critical to stay relevant, but struggle to execute and often confuse strategy and tactics. In his presentation "The Marketer's Guide to Mobile Engagement", Adam provides a strategic framework to help marketers make sense of mobile.

To make the transition to ProjectManagement.com as easily for everyone as possible, the Marketing and Sales Community of Practice Council members will conduct a brief webinar outlining the changes occurring with the PMI Communities of Practice, the transition to ProjectManagement.com, and how to get the most out of the new community at ProjectManagement.com.

Projects typically address a problem or opportunity facing the organization. Professionals leading marketing or sales projects must have a solid expertise in leading teams in the process of defining and prioritizing customer wants and needs. Being able to do so successfully ensures that the project will have clarity and trace-ability of its requirements.

Save Time With Tools + Templates

This template and its instruction sheet is aimed at project managers of solar projects for managing the procurement system process. It allows you to create and manage different procurement process data (item types, supplier list, contacts by suppliers); to create an RFP, linking it to a restricted list of preferred suppliers; to send automatic email to selected suppliers belonging to a certain RFP; to create a standard form email; to calculate forecasted date of answer from supplier; and report overdue dates.

Need a quick crash course on some social media basics? What is it? What myths are out there? How can we use it in our projects and organizations? What platforms are there? Use this primer for project managers to help find the answers.

Learn From Others

The use of agile methods lean toward faster delivery of results at a more frequent pace and in a more cost-conscious manner. However, not every project is best suited to be delivered in an agile way. As an agency partner, you need to be honest with yourself about where you are in your agile journey.

It’s not uncommon that organizations with a wide spectrum of service offerings and functional roles have blurred lines between the distinction of account and project management. The reality is that the two roles are quite different—and require different skill sets and focuses.

While most consulting firms find early success because of the strength of their thought leadership, over time many of them tend to under-invest in it. As a consequence, they find themselves vulnerable to new entrants nibbling around the edges of their core business--and see their growth slow down.

Project managers must ensure that projects are aligned with business strategy and value creation for their company and its shareholders. The author demonstrates the importance of the bridge between the business and project worlds, even when there is not a clear link between their objectives. But one objective always remains the same: to create economic value.

We are facing a period of unprecedented change. All of those changes have created new and unique challenges that project and program managers face. It's time we get serious about addressing these strategic challenges; here we present five of the top ones.

What might the future look like, you ask? Here are some things to ponder as those wishing to command a greater percentage of our consumer spend are finding ways to “customize our experience" through exploiting the opportunities social media, big data analytics and mobility promise once properly integrated.

How about managing a sales opportunity as a project? Sales pursuits that require multiple meetings with key stakeholders and involve the deployment of significant resources in order to compete for high-value contracts may be managed effectively by using the principles and techniques of project management.

While industry experts agree that not all the ideal benefits can be harvested by a typical CRM solution, organizations should at least target an implementation that sets the foundation for enhancing the customer satisfaction for their products and services in the long haul. So what makes a better CRM implementation?